One-Dimensional Keyboard Hack

The concept for a one-dimensional keyboard called Minuum completely blew up the internet last week. It works based on the principle of disambiguation, which is something I explored quite a bit during the early stages of developing ASETNIOP. The video for it was very slick, but I thought it was kind of sketchy that the designers built up so much buzz (and collected a bunch of money) yet weren’t actually willing to let anyone try it out. So I made my own version.

Some caveats:

The word suggestions are based off a dictionary of 5,000 words, gathered from subtitles and graciously donated to the web by Hermit Dave. The words are ranked according to frequency of use. A smart dictionary – one whose suggestions are based on context and grammar – would provide better options, but would be orders of magnitude bigger, so the number of choices might be overwhelming.

My program prioritizes complete words over partial suggestions, so if you’ve completed a word it will be immediately accessible.

There are only six choices available (the autocomplete suggestion and the five boxes below) – there’s a small bit of text that shows how many additional options have been determined (but they’re not accessible).

The space bar will complete the word as shown and add a space.

There is no shift or backspace or any punctuation keys.

The zoom keys don’t work on mobile devices (creating a “hover” activity takes a lot of finesse) but they do work with a mouse.

The code is not particularly elegant – a lot of it was written using spreadsheet formulas and cut-paste-find&replace, but it should work.

The mobile version doesn’t work on Opera. Otherwise I’ve tested it in other browsers on a desktop, iPhone, Droid, and iPad and it seems to work fine.

This isn’t a product release or anything (though, incidentally, I am looking to make contact with some Android developers, so if you’ve got skills please let me know), it’s just a mockup that lets you see how a system like this will look and feel in practice. Enjoy!